Running Until the Fog Lifts

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to think clearly.

Not just ‘make good decisions’ or ‘be more productive’, but something deeper than that - a kind of inner clarity. Seeing the world directly, without the haze. No mental loops, no self-talk, no background hum. Just presence. Awake, alert, tuned in to the moment I’m in.

But it’s rare. Most days, my thoughts are stuck in traffic. There’s a song on repeat in my head. A phrase I said in the wrong tone of voice three days ago. A hundred tabs open in my brain and none of them loading. I’ve always assumed this was part of how I’m wired - ADHD, or something like it. And for a long time, I treated it like a problem to solve.

Clarity became the holy grail. I meditated. I ran. I read books on attention, consciousness, flow states, hallucinogens. I even became a filmmaker - partly, I suspect, because film is the most complete tool I know for showing what clarity looks like. Light, music, rhythm, emotion - all woven together to create a moment of pure, guided perception. It’s no wonder I was drawn to it. It’s the medium that best mimics the feeling I was chasing.

Then one day, I read Will Storr’s excellent book ‘A Story is a Deal’. And suddenly I realised, most people aren’t living in clarity either. They’re living in noise. In the static of half-processed stories. In the pull of the past and the pressure of imagined futures. Our brains are narrative engines. We fill in blanks. We project motives. We relive old arguments and rehearse new ones. We are, by nature, distracted.

That’s not an accident. It’s part of the human condition.

There’s a Fiona Apple song that ends with the refrain; ‘I. . . want to feel everything’; Trent Reznor said a similar thing (although slightly more aggressively). That’s how I’ve always felt - I wanted to experience the world vividly, not as a blur. I became a biologist - not out of some great love for the scientific method - in fact both my degrees were the best example of the wrong shape being jammed into a hole I can imagine - but to dangle from treetops, to explore caves, to scour the earth for those fleeting moments of beauty that hide in plain sight in the natural world. I sailed tall ships, I crossed both the Pacific and the Atlantic in open boats, I lived in cities and wildernesses, and swam in frozen lakes. I wanted to see the world with both eyes open wide, and I wanted to do it all the time.

But the truth is, most people don’t experience reality directly. We experience a story about reality. That’s our umwelt - the German word for the slice of the world each creature can perceive. A bee sees ultraviolet light. A dolphin feels in sonar. A human tells a story.

We live in stories, whether we mean to or not. That’s why we have myths, politics, branding, religions, movies, therapy, nationalism, self-doubt. It’s why we argue about who’s right instead of asking what’s true. It’s why two people can see the same event and walk away with two completely different versions of what happened. We aren’t just seeing facts - we’re interpreting them through a framework. Often unconsciously.

“If a lion could speak”, said Wittgenstein, “we wouldn’t understand him”. Because a lion’s experience of the world is so fundamentally different from ours, we wouldn’t share the reference points. The symbols. The mental scaffolding. Dolphins see the world in a reflected vision of clicks and whistles, they dream in three dimensions. Their mental labels for other animals likely aren’t words, they’re shapes, textures, movement. Humans see 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum with our three photoreceptors - mantis shrimp have 16 kinds of photoreceptors. 

But who’s to say humans all experience the world the same? Soft White Underbelly has over 6 million followers on Youtube alone - a page dedicated to telling the stories of people with lives so vastly different to the status quo that each one is like nothing you’ve ever heard before - but there is something in each of these stories that resonates with us. Hearing someone tell their story - their background, the experiences that shaped their lives and how they see the world - is fascinating to us.

We are all living in a different kind of story. Some with more noise. Some where perception is slippery. In reality, a universal “truth” feels like a radio signal you can almost - but not quite - tune into.

And yet, for me at least, there are moments when I catch a glimpse of something that feels universal. Fleeting, but real. Where the fog lifts. Where I’m not listening to my story, I’m just in all of our stories together. Usually it happens when I’m running, or swimming, or sitting still for long enough that my brain gets bored of its own patterns. Sometimes it comes through film - when I’m deep in the edit, or behind the camera, and everything else fades.

In those moments, I remember that clarity isn’t a default state. It’s something we touch, briefly, like a glint of sun through trees. 

Now my goal isn’t to live in clarity, but to return to it, now and then. To build habits, practices, and ways of working that let me remember what it feels like. And to know that those moments help shape the rest of the noise.

And that’s part of why I make films. Not just because I love stories, but because stories are the world, as humans experience it. They’re not separate from reality - they are our reality. And if we can tell better stories, truer stories, more emotionally honest stories, maybe we get closer to clarity. Even just for a second.

Someone once said to me during a meeting, in an offhand way that totally belied the abrupt change in direction my life took because of hearing it, “to be a better species, we need to tell better stories”. In a world so utterly connected and at the same time disjointed and fractured, where as the late David Berman said, “every day [we’re] playing chicken with oblivion” - there has never been a more important time to tell - and listen to - the stories around us. And to understand that they’re just that - 

stories.